Looks like EA really fumbled this one.

There was a period of about 22 hours where, if you logged into Madden NFL 23, there was a chance your Connected Franchise Mode saves became permanently corrupted. The 22-hour long span took place from December 28 through December 29. Those dates happened to come just after EA told players they were good to log in and play. Oops.

Now, the good news here is that if you logged into the game during this time there is a 40% chance that EA has been able to recover your saves. That means the bad news for 60% of you is that your saves are forever gone and you will need to start over from scratch. There are some really hardcore Franchise players out there that are probably extremely furious right now.

The full timeline of events is as follows:

• Monday, December 26: EA sends out a tweet saying that they are "aware of players experiencing connection issues when trying to connect to CFM."
• Wednesday, December 28: EA says that "users should now be able to play CFM without issue."
• Thursday, December 29: EA issues another update saying that they are "aware of users encountering issues when connecting to CFM late last night." They began an investigation to see what was going on.
• Saturday, December 31: A longer explanation of the issues was posted to the EA Answers HQ. EA claims that users who logged in between December 28 at 2:45PM (ET) through December 29 at 12:45AM (ET) probably lost their saves for good "due to a data storage issue that resulted in Franchise files being corrupted."

The team working on this issue say that they are expecting only "around 40% of leagues to be recovered" meaning that 60% of players are up a certain creek without a paddle. They also say that it's safe to log in now, but given what happened the last time they said this you may want to be a little cautious.

It's a bit perplexing how something like this can happen in this day and age when regular backups are so common.